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FindingTheOne

Published: 2007 May 9
Categories: Essays

By Bryce Yan

Women (Monica in particular) always ask me, "How do you know you are marrying 'The One'? You know, your soul mate, your other half, your companion for life." And when I give them my typical response to questions whose answers require 500 words or more, which is, "I don't know," they squint their eyes, lower their voices and say, "Are you doing the Ally McBeal thing? Like you know, settling for whoever that seems good enough at the time you turn thirty."

Then they kindly remind me with a warm rhetorical whisper, "You just turned thirty, didn't you?" Thanks for being my friends. Your confidence in me has been overwhelming. And your guidance excellent. Thank you. Well, first of all, the very concept of "The One," that there is somebody out there who is destined to be your one and only true love, is simply ridiculous. Even if such a person exists (and I'm assuming uniqueness here), the chances of you two meeting and falling in love and living happily ever after are pretty minimal, okay? Oh, those you pay money for do not count of course. Let's be reasonable here. Second of all, even when you do meet and fall in love, there is no way in hell you can say for certain that, "Oh yeah, she's the one," unless you scored with everyone else, which is clearly impossible. But of course, once you've accepted that you have been living in a romantic fantasy land all your life and that prince charming is but a bubble created for you by the Walt Disney Company, you can turn the table around and relax the definition of "The One" to make it more...practical (I boldly propose). Instead of looking for "The One," you look for "The Likely One," who is very similar to "The One" (who is the best match for you in the entire Universe). "The Likely One" is the best match for you as well, but in a smaller subset, say your MCI's circle of friends and family. Then the question becomes: How do you scope out the best possible candidate within this small subset of the Universe? Intrigued are you?

To appreciate my point, consider the following puzzle. The king, in order to find a wise commoner to marry his daughter, offers you a chance by guessing the largest dowry among 100 ladies in the court. Each lady comes with a different dowry amount, with the princess naturally having the largest one. The amounts of the dowries are written on slips of paper. A slip is drawn at random one at a time. you must decide whether to choose or refuse the first amount as the largest. If you decide against the first, you must choose or refuse the next one and so on until you choose one or else the slips are exhausted. If you successfully choose the largest amount, you get the princess and her dowry. Otherwise, you get nothing. Once you refuse a dowry, you cannot go back to it. So what's your optimal strategy? And what is the optimal probability of success?

Most people may not be able to work out an exact mathematical answer to my puzzle. But they can easily figure out the strategy, which is very intuitive. In fact, we employ this strategy all the time. For example, let's say that you were to find the perfect job. Most people would hop a few companies before they settle into a particular one that they like best. Makes sense, doesn't it? Same thing goes with choosing the right partner in life. The real problem is that you just don't know how many jobs or women you should hop before you stop. Some people stay in their first job forever or marry their first and only love, which is fine by me. But deep down inside, how the hell do they know they've made the right choice?

And that's when calculus comes to your rescue, my friends. Up until now you think you wasted your time and energy in your math classes. Little did you know that therein lies the truth to one of the most important questions in life: How do you spot true love? God is ironically satirical in so many wicked ways. Unbelievable. Anyways, back to the problem, let's assume we have N dowries instead of 100 for ease of notation. if you work out the calculus, you'll discover that you should stop refusing starting at the N/e-th dowry, provided that N is a big enough number ("e" is the transcendental constant approximately equal to 2.718). In other words, you first open up N/e dowries (and dump them all), then you open the remaining ones one by one and refuse them until you find a dowry amount that is larger than all the previously opened ones. Then you declare that to be your choice. The probability of success turns out to be 1/e, which is approximately 36.79%. That's a truly amazing result. This strategy gives you almost 40% chance of predicting the largest value correctly even if you had a million dowries to choose from!

The physics of choosing "The Likely One" is now clear. First, you'll have to figure out the size of your subset of the Universe. Let's say it takes a year to develop a relationship before you can assess the worthiness of the woman in question. Let's further assume that you want to get married before the age of 30. Assuming that your serious dating starts at the age of 20. That yields the maximum number of qualified relationships to be 10, which is basically the size of the subset of possible soul mates. (One-nightstands and hookers are not considered as assessable relationships.) So the optimal strategy is as follows.

Dump all the chicks in your first four serious relationships after you have thoroughly evaluated their performance. Keep on dating until you find a girl who's better than all the rest by your standards and measurements. Then discontinue your dating and marry her, because probabilistically, she's "The Likely One." Upon hearing that Monica told me happily, "So I'm your sixth girlfriend and I'm better than the other five! :-)"

"Uh, Honey, you're number seven."

"!!..."